Strathclyde Police Shutdown Its Website

Strathclyde Police from Glasgow, UK, was compelled to shut down its website because of the fear of virus attack from Chinese hackers.

The website was shut down in order to enable the IT department of Strathclyde Police to examine the threat after some web links appearing on the website redirecting users to a website known for circulating viruses.

The Police officials stated that their computer experts had come across an irregularity, but had ruled out any virus attack and claimed that no one who had logged on their website would have put their system at danger, as per the news by herald Scotland on June 8, 2010.

The web users who tried to access the website came across a black-and-white screen with a message that showed content - "the website down for maintenance; the office authorities apologize for any inconvenience."

Grant Gibson, Digital Innovation Manager at the Herald and Times Group, said that the hack placed XSS or cross site scripting java script tags on the homepage of their website and some other pages. In fact, Gibson was the first to inform Strathclyde Police about the possible compromise, as per the reports by The Register on June 8, 2010.

He also cautioned that the police should not get complacent and take the threat seriously.

Moreover, Gibson said that in spite of whether the website was active or dormant at this time, the hackers had a window into the Strathclyde Police page from a location out of their control. This 'window' is registered to an individual in China, which could be reactivated any time.

According to the reports, the objective of the attack, in which hackers put in a harmful code on the home page and many other important pages, is still not known.

But people using the website through Internet Explorer were quietly diverted to robint.us, a web address in China. This site was recognized by web security officials at Symantec as being a high security risk to users after it was behind a previous virus attack that chiefly attacked older versions of Internet Explorer.